The Eloquence of Blood

by Judith Rock

  “I wish Père Jouvancy were here,” Le Picart said. “He would have been very pleased with you both.”

  Charles said, “He brings the boys back from Gentilly on Sunday?”

  “Yes.” Le Picart sipped his wine in silence and then raised an ironic eyebrow at Charles. “As I have already said, Maître du Luc, you were perfectly correct, I was also smiling tonight over the welcome bequest coming to us. Le bon Dieu and all the saints must be growing weary of my unceasing thanks.”

  “Can you tell us who the bequest comes from?” Damiot said diffidently.

  “From the family of one of our own, Père Christophe Mynette, who taught here until his death many years ago. Before Christmas, a week or two back, Frère Brunet went to the apothecary in the Place Maubert to replenish his stock of medicines. The apothecary mentioned that Père Mynette’s niece, the last Mynette relative, had died. May God receive her soul.”

  Le Picart and Père Damiot crossed themselves, but Charles stood motionless, staring at the rector.

  “Did you say Mynette, mon père?”

  “He did,” Damiot said. “I remember old Père Mynette, poor soul. My father knew him. I was still in the Novice House here in Paris, and there was a terrible epidemic of the little pox. It took Père Mynette among the first. Understandable, since he must have been eighty or so.”

  “With the passing of Père Mynette’s niece, Anne Mynette, the Mynette family dies out,” the rector said. “Otherwise, of course, the family fortune could not come to us.”

  “Mon père,” Charles began reluctantly, but the rector talked over him.

  “Monsieur Simon Mynette, who was Père Mynette’s younger brother, was a well-off lawyer, and always very proud of his older brother’s Jesuit vocation. Jesuits, of course, cannot personally inherit money, but Monsieur Simon Mynette promised that after his daughter Anne’s death, the Mynette money would come to the college in Père Christophe Mynette’s honor. Anne Mynette, you see, never married and there were no other relatives. No, I lie. I believe there was one other, but he went out to the New World and died there. We have, of course, very carefully kept Monsieur Simon Mynette’s notarized letter explaining all that and laying out what we can expect. I have summoned the notary who drew it up, but he has not yet answered me.”

  Charles tried again. “Is Mynette a common name?”

  Damiot and Le Picart looked at him in surprise.

  “Common enough, I suppose,” the rector said. “Why?”

  “Because this morning, when I called on Monsieur Callot from the bourgeois Congregation of the Sainte Vierge, I met a young woman with that surname. Her Christian name is Martine, and she is a friend of Monsieur Callot’s great-niece. This Martine Mynette is an adopted child, and the woman who adopted her, one Anne Mynette, died recently. The girl is distraught because the donation entre vifs, by which her mother left her the Mynette fortune, cannot be found.”

  The rector looked as though someone had slapped him. “And where does this girl live?” he said, when he could get words out.

  “In the Place Maubert, at the Sign of the Rose.”

  “That was Simon Mynette’s house.” Le Picart drained his wineglass and stared narrow-eyed at the wall, as though unpleasant sums were written on the plaster. “This donation—did the girl say who drew it up? And when?”

  “She didn’t say when. Monsieur Callot’s nephew drew it up, a notary whose surname is Brion, I don’t know his Christian name.”

  Le Picart’s face darkened with anger. “Brion? The notary who witnessed and sealed our letter from Simon Mynette promising us the bequest was Monsieur Henri Brion. He lived near the Place. There cannot be two notaries there called Brion. Why in God’s name did the man not tell us about the donation? That is inexcusable! And his behavior since Mademoiselle Anne Mynette died is also inexcusable. I have sent him message after message, and he sends polite nothing-saying messages back, but he does not come to tell me how things stand with the money.”

  “But mon père,” Damiot said, spreading his arms and sloshing wine onto the floor. “Maître du Luc has said that the donation is lost. Which one must feel is only just, if this Anne Mynette really flouted her father’s wishes so brazenly by adopting an orphan, a child of some other blood, and trying to give it the Mynette fortune. I feel strongly that one should not be allowed to do that with a family patrimoine.”

  “How can you say this loss is just?” Charles shot back, stung on Martine Mynette’s behalf. “Plainly, Mademoiselle Anne Mynette came to have other wishes about the money after her father and her Jesuit uncle were dead. And why shouldn’t she? I think you must not have sisters, mon père.”

  Damiot blinked. “Sisters? No. What does that have to do with it? What matters is that the paper is lost. So where is our difficulty? There is no impediment in the way of the bequest.”

  Le Picart frowned at Damiot but said nothing. Charles could almost see his thoughts moving behind his eyes.

  “Maître du Luc,” the rector said, “you know Monsieur Callot. I want you to go back to him tomorrow morning—and go alone; I don’t want word of this getting out yet. For the sake of absolute certainty, find out the name of this deceased Anne Mynette’s father and whether she had a Jesuit uncle. Then find out when this alleged donation was made. When I am certain of those facts, I will confront our elusive notary Henri Brion.”

  “Exactly,” Damiot said, nodding vigorously. “Alleged is exactly the word! Do we really believe that the Châtelet clerks are so careless as to lose a donation entre vifs?”

  “I believe they are all too human, Père Damiot.” The rector fixed him with a hard gray stare. “Like all of us. Are you saying we should simply disregard this Mynette girl and her claim? Assuming she can substantiate it. Are you so eager to be done with bean pottage that you would not choke on fraud? Until we know whether there was a donation—and if there was, that it is truly lost—we will do nothing.”

  “No, mon père, but if—”

  “We will not defraud the girl, don’t even think it. More than that, don’t tempt me to it!” The rector rubbed a hand over his face. “Because God knows, the money means a great deal to us. A dozen more scholarships for promising boys from poor families. Finishing repairs to the old college of Les Cholets building we’ve bought for more classrooms. A doubled alms budget for the student Congregations of the Sainte Vierge. And, yes, we would eat less bean pottage. And if this money does not come to us, not only will those things not happen, the figures in the bursar’s ledger will force me to raise rents on houses we own. And the tenants cannot afford it.” Le Picart looked grimly at Charles. “Report to me the moment you return tomorrow.” Then his face softened a little and he said, “I wish this happy evening had ended more cheerfully. I thank you both again for the pleasure you gave to us.” He gave Damiot the ghost of a smile. “I should tell you that I, too, loathe bean pottage.”

  Chapter 4

  ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST’S DAY, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27

  Charles went early to the Place Maubert, walking through skiffs of snow fallen in the night and under a lowering sky that promised more. Turning off the rue St. Jacques, he just managed to dodge a vinegar seller pushing his low, single-wheeled handcart to a house door, where a pretty young servant waited with her wicker-wrapped jug. As the curly-haired vendor took her jug to fill from his spigoted barrel, she dimpled and spoke teasingly to him, and he laughed and teased her back.

  The hair straying from under her starched white coif was nearly as fair as Martine Mynette’s. Charles hoped fervently that Martine Mynette would find her donation. Or that she could at least prove that she was a legitimately born orphan. He wondered why her adopted mother had never married and had children of her own. A woman with family wealth would almost certainly have had marriage offers, unless there was something direly wrong with her. How could her father have been so sure that she wouldn’t marry after his death? If she had, and had borne children, his promise to the Jesuits would have been meaningless.
By law, no one could will a patrimoine away from blood relatives.

  But Anne Mynette hadn’t married. So now, if her adopted daughter’s donation wasn’t found, and the girl went on refusing the Brion son, her guardian could make life difficult indeed for her. Without the donation, even entering a convent would be difficult for her, since most convents required dowries. And even with a dowry, the better ones wouldn’t have her at all unless she could prove that she’d been orphaned, not abandoned. The chance of a gently reared girl like Martine descending to the shame of domestic service was unthinkable. Charles had awakened in the night worrying about her. Something about the girl’s aloneness touched an answering aloneness in himself. Though his own present loneliness came from his own choice not to marry and have children, it companioned him these days like a sad ghost. Not that he was alone in the world—he had legions of Jesuit brothers and also living blood relatives: his mother, sisters, a brother, and more cousins than he could count.

  His cousin Pernelle, in Geneva, haunted too many of his restless nights. Most du Lucs were Catholic, but Pernelle, his second cousin and first love, was a Huguenot. The king’s recent decree making Huguenots outlaws had unleashed havoc all over France, and last summer, against the laws of king and church, Charles had helped Pernelle escape the king’s soldiers. Charles took his faith and his Jesuit vows very seriously. But blood was blood, and even more than that, he believed with all his heart that the beginning and end of God was love. Which made cruelty in the name of religion the worst kind of blasphemy. But helping Pernelle had rekindled both his old love for her and his vocational doubts.

  At the end of the summer, he’d made an eight-day retreat with other Jesuit scholastics, and at the end of it he had renewed his first-level vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, publicly reaffirming his vocation. The autumn had been a time of willing penance for the vows he had broken. It had also been a time full of the grieving that comes with deep choice. It was grief without the scourge of regret, thank God; but nonetheless, Martine Mynette touched the sorest place in his heart.

  As Charles started across the bustling Place Maubert to the rue Perdue, he saw a small crowd gathered outside the open gates of the Sign of the Rose. He stopped and stared, and then broke into a run.

  “What’s happened?” he asked urgently of the first person he reached.

  The man, a baker by his apron and baglike cap, turned, his mouth open to answer, but when he saw Charles, his mouth closed with a snap and he turned away. A woman next to him glared at Charles.

  “Listen to that one,” she muttered to her neighbor. “Pretending he doesn’t know what’s happened, but that’s them all over. Hypocrites, all of them.”

  Charles, pushing through the crowd into the court, hardly heard her. An aproned apprentice took his arm. “Don’t pay attention to them,” he said in Charles’s ear. “The commissaire just went in—that’s all anyone knows.”

  Charles nodded and made his way to the house door, which stood open, and was inside, staring at what lay on the antechamber floor, before the sergent standing guard could stop him.

  “Here, mon père,” the sergent growled, “stay out, there’s been murder here!”

  Then he saw the stricken look on Charles’s face and stepped aside. Like someone in an evil dream, Charles crossed the antechamber to the foot of the stone staircase. Martine Mynette’s face was turned away, her silvergilt hair spilling from its little black coif. The blood from the wound in her neck hardly showed on her black gown. But blood stood in pools on the stone-tiled floor around her. A weeping woman knelt beside Martine. A hand gripped Charles’s shoulder, and Charles pulled roughly away, thinking it was the sergent.

  “Pray for her, maître,” M. Callot quavered. He was as sober as a gravestone, but he reached for Charles’s arm as though he might fall. “Pray for all of us. Who would do this to little Martine?”

  Charles, beyond speech, shook his head.

  Callot tightened his grip. “Pray, maître!”

  From somewhere, Charles dredged up the opening words of the prayers for the dead, and Callot joined him. When they finished the familiar, steadying words, Charles’s brain was working again. He realized that the weeping woman kneeling beside Martine was Isabel Brion.

  “Did you and Mademoiselle Brion find Mademoiselle Mynette’s body?” Charles asked.

  “We came to see how she was, after being so upset yesterday. The girls still hadn’t found Martine’s paper, of course. Nor did my lazy, useless nephew, so far as I know—I haven’t seen him yet today, he’s probably still sleeping. And when I get my hands on him—dear Blessed Virgin, if I’d known what was happening here—no servants but a kitchen boy and that drunken maid. I tell you, Henri is as guilty of her death as anyone, the miser! If she’d been properly looked after, this wouldn’t have happened, how could it? If Martine had only told us how things were, we would have taken her in. But as you heard, she didn’t want to come to us because of Gilles. I see now that Henri let this household fall apart to try to force her to come and live with us. Because he didn’t want to spend any of the Mynette money on this house and its servants!” The old man was shaking with fury. “And the servants certainly knew the donation was missing.” He sighed. “In fairness to my unspeakable nephew, I should have known they’d start leaving as soon as they heard that. What can you expect—they knew they’d be out on the street soon enough if the paper wasn’t found, so they went looking for more secure places.” Callot shook his head and breathed hard to steady himself. When he could speak again, he said more quietly, “When Isabel and I arrived here, Martine’s maid was screaming. She’d just come down and found her. The idiot woman reeks of wine.” Callot wiped his eyes and jerked his head at an alcove to the right of the stairs. “I sent the kitchen boy for the commissaire.”

  The sergent stood at the alcove’s entrance now, and beyond him was a tall man in a commissaire’s long black legal robe and black hat. A clerk scribbled at his side, taking down the testimony of a sobbing woman in a smoke-blue skirt.

  “The commissaire is still questioning the sot of a maid,” Callot muttered. “Much good that will be to him. Dear God, who would do this?”

  Charles patted the old man’s arm and went to Isabel Brion. Seeing that she was kneeling in blood, he pulled her gently to her feet. She looked up at him, her face drowned in tears.

  “Maître du Luc? How could this happen? Poor Martine, she never harmed anyone!” She covered her face with her hands.

  With his arm around her for fear she would fall, Charles led her to a carved bench against the wall and settled her on it. Then, hoping his face showed nothing of the storm of pity and anger that raged inside him, he went back to Martine’s body and bent over it. The barest of touches told him that while the front of the bodice was soaked in blood, the skirt was hardly stained. He leaned closer, studying the ragged rip in the right side of the young woman’s neck. Swiftly, closing his ears to Mlle Brion’s gasp of surprise, he raised Martine’s upper body so he could see her back. There was blood there, but it could as easily be from the blood pooled on the floor as from another wound. But that would not be sure until the body was undressed. There was, at least, no other visible wound. Charles started looking for the blade. A small knife, he thought, but deadly sharp. If the blade hadn’t ripped open the great artery, the wound in her neck would have been much too small to kill her. He combed the floor and the staircase, looked under the bench, but found nothing. There were blood splashes, though, on the plaster wall nearest her body, which made Charles think that the murderer had almost certainly been splashed himself. Even so, the man had been self-possessed enough to take the weapon away with him. Charles leaned down and touched Martine’s hand. It was cooling—she would cool quickly on the cold floor—but some of her body’s warmth was still there. Not long, then. She had been alive to see the morning, if not the light. He went to the open house door and looked at the elaborate lock. Then he saw the iron key, as long as his hand, hanging beside
the door. He went back to Isabel.

  “Mademoiselle, did the maid have to unlock the door to let you in?”

  She hesitated. “No, she didn’t. When we heard her scream, my uncle pushed on the door and it opened.”

  Charles nodded. “Another question, mademoiselle. Did Martine Mynette’s mother have an uncle who was a Jesuit?”

  “Oh. Yes, she did. But he died a long time ago. Before Martine and I were even born, I think. I remember my father saying that he was a teacher at Louis le Grand.”

  It was the answer he’d expected. “Thank you, mademoiselle. Shall I find your great-uncle and ask him to take you home?”

  “No. No, I thank you, but I want to stay here. Martine was my dearest friend. When they will let us, I will help the maid do the last things for her.”

  Charles had to swallow before he could speak. “You are a good friend to her. I will pray for you and for Mademoiselle Mynette. If you will allow it, I will come tomorrow to see you and Monsieur Callot.”

  She nodded, and he took his leave of her. He went to where Martine lay and looked once more at her still face. Then he left the house, deaf to the growl of angry talk as he passed the crowd around the gate. He walked quickly, numb with grief for this girl he’d met only yesterday, blackly full of anger at whoever had destroyed her. Before he reached the college, snow came. It settled on his shoulders, stuck to his eyelashes, and half blinded him. It comforted him, silencing the streets and seeming to shroud the houses in cold white mourning.